Gerry Cinnamon doesn’t like talking about himself. “There’s enough people talking,” he shrugs early in our conversation, as if the music should explain everything. Trouble is, his story has grown almost as loud as the songs themselves: a working-class Glaswegian who ignored every bit of industry logic and somehow filled stadiums on his own terms. No label cavalry, no bloated marketing machine, just him, a guitar, and the kind of word-of-mouth that turns bonfires into infernos.
“I don’t really do interviews for analysis,” he says, but the thing about Cinnamon is that even in his refusal, he ends up sketching the thesis. He insists he doesn’t chase charts, doesn’t crave fame, doesn’t even bother trying to explain the narrative. “People just make stuff up,” he shrugs. Then again, when you can pack Hampden Park without a record deal, the narrative writes itself.
The Bonnie, his second album, is stacked with songs that sound deceptively simple—chords you can strum in your bedroom, choruses you can shout with 50,000 of your closest mates. It’s not simplicity out of laziness. He compares it to Reservoir Dogs’ notorious ear-cutting scene: you don’t see the violence, but your mind fills in the rest. “I’m trying to leave it up to the listener to finish the song,” he explains. “When you sing it along in your house or in a crowd, it becomes yours.”
Cinnamon calls it “the war for real music,” though his definition of “real” isn’t some fetish for authenticity—it’s about ownership. “How many artists get shoved into ten radios and told what to say?” he asks. “There’s a disconnect. Songs get lost. So I strip it back.” He laughs when I suggest he should cover “Stuck in the Middle with You,” the tune Tarantino twisted forever with that ear scene. “I’m sure,” he grins, half-threat, half-promise.
He’s blunt about the timing of his success. If all this had landed when he was in his twenties? “I’d be dead,” he says flatly. “Didn’t make it past the first album, definitely. I still like a party, but I’m older now. You just get the job done.” There’s no grand ambition beyond the next gig, the next track. He hoards songs the way other people hoard grudges—“ten years old, five years old, whatever”—and pulls them out when they nag him enough.
Those lyrics, though. They read like poetry someone scrawled on a pub wall at 3 a.m. and somehow made it rhyme. Cinnamon credits Neil Young’s “Powderfinger,” a track he describes like a miniature film reel. “It tells a whole movie in a few lines,” he says. That economy of words is his obsession: maximum meaning, minimum syllables, laced with double entendres so the songs can haunt you twice. “If it keeps popping in my head,” he says, “that means there’s something to it.”
Not that he pretends everything is autobiography. “Sometimes I’m just talking to myself,” he admits. A track like “Canter” came from internal pep talks—“The hardest part of the game isn’t even playing, it’s caring enough to care about it”—but turned outward when fans began quoting it back to him as life advice. “If it helps one person, then that’s the music’s job. Why wouldn’t you?”
Other songs are more pointed. “Every Man’s Truth” swipes at flat-earthers, chemtrail obsessives, and every Facebook-certified genius with a YouTube channel. But Cinnamon isn’t exactly sneering. “I’m not having a go at people questioning things,” he says. “Everybody should question things. It’s when they don’t rationalize, when they don’t take other people’s views in. Opinions are like castles, everybody’s got one.”
Then there’s “Ahead of the Clouds,” his ode to insomnia. Cinnamon casually drops that he’s gone three days without sleep—by choice. “I used to do it intentionally to get myself into another step,” he says. His mother never slept either. Childhood nights were spent awake, inventing excuses not to go to school. “You stay up three days, you’re not the most positive person in the world,” he admits. But even that song spirals upward. “There’s always a positive start to escape the negative,” he insists.
The Bonnie’s artwork leans into those themes of boyhood and trouble, innocence and smoke. On one cover, a group of lads huddle near a bonfire; on another, a child peers back over his shoulder, somewhere between mischief and regret. Cinnamon explains it with another borrowed mantra: “Build your own bonfire.” His uncle’s advice became a guiding metaphor—pile up your own kindling, light it yourself, and see who gathers around.
For all his insistence that he has no grand ambitions, the man has accidentally staged one of the most radical coups in modern music: proof that a singer with an acoustic guitar can still outdraw the pop industry’s marketing departments. When I tell him as much, he only shakes his head. “I don’t get why people want to be famous,” he says. “I just write songs.”
And yet, there he is, winning the war he doesn’t want to fight.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
